ARTICLES ABOUT DISEASE BY DATE - PAGE 3

CAMDEN A 57-year-old Camden woman has tested positive for meningococcal disease and is recovering at home after being hospitalized, Camden County officials said. The victim, whom officials did not identify Wednesday, began undergoing treatment Feb. 28 at Kennedy University Hospital-Cherry Hill for an unknown illness. The patient's serology blood test showed she had meningococcemia, a disease caused by the bacterium Neisseria meningitidis , officials said. The Camden County Health Department and New Jersey Department of Health and Human Services were notified Monday, and others in the woman's household were found to be free of the disease.

M AX PERELMAN, 37, of East Falls, is co-founder and head of business development for Philly start-up Biomeme. Backed by DreamIt Ventures, Biomeme has a device that will turn your smartphone into a mobile DNA-replicating machine to help point-of-care clinicians quickly diagnose and track infectious diseases. Other co-founders are Jesse vanWestrienen, 30, of Old City, and Marc DeJohn, 44, of East Falls. Q: How did you come up with the idea for Biomeme? A: Marc and Jesse have backgrounds in bioscience and engineering and had been working on a mobile-diagnostics device.

Watching your weight? Hoping for better heart health? Trying to prevent type 2 diabetes? Nuts to all that! It turns out that nuts appear to bestow a wide variety of health benefits, from helping clear out bad cholesterol to cutting down on visceral fat to reducing the risk of dying from heart disease or cancer. The benefits of consuming nuts were emphasized late last year in a large study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Findings revealed that participants in the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study who ate a fistful of nuts daily were 20 percent less likely to die from any cause over a 30-year period than those who did not consume nuts.

I AM a 28-year-old recovering heroin addict. Having said that, Ms. Flowers, I now need to address your perceptions of addiction and specifically Philip Seymour Hoffman's death. Being educated in this field, both academically and personally, I am blessed with a unique insight into the disease of addiction. And, make no mistake about it, it is a disease. However, it is not a disease like cancer or diabetes, as some like to compare it to. It is a disease not like any other. It is threefold in nature: a mental obsession, like obsessive-compulsive disorder; a physical allergy, like one would have to peanut butter; and a spiritual malady, which I have no words to explain.

Theirs is not the kind of medical history anyone wants. The grandchildren of George Melling hope others can learn from the trail of death and damaged hearts that runs through their family tree. Four cousins - the children of two of George's daughters - died decades ago when their hearts stopped suddenly. Two were teenagers; another was 22 years old. When one of the mothers developed heart problems, a Johns Hopkins University doctor began looking for inherited heart defects in other family members and readily found them.

R AJIV MAHALE, 31, and Jonathan McEuen, 32, both of Center City, and Jake Boy, 26, of Roxborough, are co-founders of startup SpeSo Health at 17th and Walnut streets in Center City. SpeSo has an online platform for identifying and accessing top medical experts in 6,000 rare diseases so that health-care systems can create communities and share information. I spoke with Mahale, who earned a master's degree from Wharton. Q: How'd you come up with the idea for the biz? A: A family member was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer.

Dermatologist Gil Yosipovitch believes itch should be studied and treated as a disease in itself, not just a symptom of disease. That's why he founded the International Society for the Study of Itch in 2005. And that's partly why he left North Carolina's Wake Forest University six months ago to create the Itch Center at Temple University School of Medicine. "We're behind our colleagues in the field of pain," said Yosipovitch, who is also the new chair of Temple's dermatology department.

The bottlenose dolphins are migrating south. So officials in New Jersey thought that they had seen the last of the strandings - animals washing onto beaches, dead or dying - in what has become the largest Atlantic Coast die-off of dolphins in memory. But on Monday, the body of another dolphin, this one badly decomposed, washed ashore on a Delaware Bay beach, taking the state's total of stranded dolphins to 135 since July 1. Overall, more than 800 dolphins have stranded along the coast, although officials fear far more have died offshore and never been discovered.

Stanley Plotkin, 81, creator of the rubella vaccine, hopes another vaccine can be made to vanquish Lyme disease. Plotkin's call for a new Lyme disease vaccine is also personal. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times this summer, Plotkin, a Doylestown resident and professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, described how in 2005, his son, Alec, was felled with a heart ailment caused by Lyme. Although Alec has since recovered, Plotkin urged patients and physicians to contact the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and encourage the agency to make a Lyme vaccine a top priority.

For Kathy Spreen, Lyme disease is a family affair. The trouble for her West Chester family started with her husband, who complained of fatigue and shoulder pain. Diagnosed with Lyme, he was treated with antibiotics and cured. About a year later, suffering with fatigue and joint pain, Spreen was treated twice for Lyme, which led to arthroscopic surgery and an eventual knee replacement. But when her 20-year old son Chris was rushed to the emergency room with a fever near 106 degrees and lapsing in and out of consciousness, she felt helpless.